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About That History

Lieberman spanks the Dems for their abandonment of core values, and confusion about who is the enemy and who is us, going back decades.  WSJ: 

How did the Democratic Party get here? How did the party of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy drift so far from the foreign policy and national security principles and policies that were at the core of its identity and its purpose?

Beginning in the 1940s, the Democratic Party was forced to confront two of the most dangerous enemies our nation has ever faced: Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. In response, Democrats under Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy forged and conducted a foreign policy that was principled, internationalist, strong and successful.

…

This worldview began to come apart in the late 1960s, around the war in Vietnam. In its place, a very different view of the world took root in the Democratic Party. Rather than seeing the Cold War as an ideological contest between the free nations of the West and the repressive regimes of the communist world, this rival political philosophy saw America as the aggressor – a morally bankrupt, imperialist power whose militarism and “inordinate fear of communism” represented the real threat to world peace.

It argued that the Soviets and their allies were our enemies not because they were inspired by a totalitarian ideology fundamentally hostile to our way of life, or because they nursed ambitions of global conquest. Rather, the Soviets were our enemy because we had provoked them, because we threatened them, and because we failed to sit down and accord them the respect they deserved. In other words, the Cold War was mostly America’s fault.

That sounds awfully familiar. See, you got your war junkie history, then you got your peace-love-dove hippy pothead history. But I’d dicker with Lieberman on some of the fine points.

… beginning in the 1980s, a new effort began on the part of some of us in the Democratic Party to reverse these developments, and reclaim our party’s lost tradition of principle and strength in the world. Our band of so-called New Democrats was successful sooner than we imagined possible when, in 1992, Bill Clinton and Al Gore were elected. In the Balkans, for example, as President Clinton and his advisers slowly but surely came to recognize that American intervention, and only American intervention, could stop Slobodan Milosevic and his campaign of ethnic slaughter, Democratic attitudes about the use of military force in pursuit of our values and our security began to change.

The Clinton policy of using military force was largely based on vanity, and when it actually mattered, was not surprisingly became an impotent exercise … a few missiles here, a few missiles there … against enemies who were directly and repeatedly attacking our armed forces and our embassies. Where he did opt for full force, it was on the model pioneered under George Bush the elder, a Republican. Bomb the daylights out of the enemy for a couple of months and they will fold. Clinton lucked out in having an exceedingly compliant adversary. The objective, though presented as European security, was in fact the avoidance of embarrassment and placating of useless allies who are unable to do much for themselves.  It had the side benefit of stopping an atrocity and the displacement of 2 million people. It’s not a little ironic that the removal a despot responsible for significantly more murder and two cross-border invasions, whose continued existence threatened vital global interests, is viewed as a mistake largely because it wasn’t easy enough and because the Republican president believed the same things as a Democratic president who prefered to let the United Nations and Europe dictate his foreign policy. 

This happy development continued into the 2000 campaign, when the Democratic candidate – Vice President Gore – championed a freedom-focused foreign policy, confident of America’s moral responsibilities in the world, and unafraid to use our military power. He pledged to increase the defense budget by $50 billion more than his Republican opponent – and, to the dismay of the Democratic left, made sure that the party’s platform endorsed a national missile defense.

By contrast, in 2000, Gov. George W. Bush promised a “humble foreign policy” and criticized our peacekeeping operations in the Balkans.

Today, less than a decade later, the parties have completely switched positions. The reversal began, like so much else in our time, on September 11, 2001. The attack on America by Islamist terrorists shook President Bush from the foreign policy course he was on. He saw September 11 for what it was: a direct ideological and military attack on us and our way of life. If the Democratic Party had stayed where it was in 2000, America could have confronted the terrorists with unity and strength in the years after 9/11.

Instead a debate soon began within the Democratic Party about how to respond to Mr. Bush. I felt strongly that Democrats should embrace the basic framework the president had advanced for the war on terror as our own, because it was our own. But that was not the choice most Democratic leaders made. When total victory did not come quickly in Iraq, the old voices of partisanship and peace at any price saw an opportunity to reassert themselves. By considering centrism to be collaboration with the enemy – not bin Laden, but Mr. Bush – activists have successfully pulled the Democratic Party further to the left than it has been at any point in the last 20 years.

Lieberman goes on to compare Obama to McCain on those points. About that internal Democratic debate, Lieberman is the insider who participated in it, so to some extent we have to cede to his view. But I think he suffers from a little Dem delusion himself if he thinks “the basic framework the president had advanced for the war on terror … was our own.” Action against actual enemies has not been a core principle of the Democratic Party for four decades. It is a principle in fact so utterly marginalized in the party that its most vocal advocate was run out, an intolerance that suggests a freedom-focused policy of military strength was never more than superficial. Democratic handwringing about the use of force didn’t start with resistance in Iraq. The very loud lefty chorus that rose before the dust of the Twin Towers had settled was “why do they hate us” and a lot of gnashing of teeth about what a disaster invading Afghanistan was going to be. Lieberman more correctly pegs the consistent Democratic framework from Vietnam to the present as the target of a decades-old admonishment.

A great Democratic secretary of state, Dean Acheson, once warned “no people in history have ever survived, who thought they could protect their freedom by making themselves inoffensive to their enemies.” This is a lesson that today’s Democratic Party leaders need to relearn.

Topics: history, pols

  Posted by Jules Crittenden at 9:05 am on Wednesday, May 21, 2008

2 Responses to “About That History”

1. The_Real_JeffS Says:
   May 21st, 2008 at 9:32 am

   The Democrats were truly lost when they abandoned Lieberman. Too bad he just doesn’t cross over to the Republicans, but I suppose that he just can’t let go of the memory of the old Democratic Party.

   I don’t blame him for feeling that way, but it ain’t coming back any time soon. Deal with it, Joe.

2. Michael Lonie Says:
   May 22nd, 2008 at 2:10 am

   Except for his support for the war against the jihadist terrorists Lieberman is an exemplary liberal. He swallows all their falshoods and delusions in domestic matters. It shows you how small is the Democratic tent, the Dems could not stand a man who dissented on only a single issue. So they purged him for excessive loyalty to the USA.

   Clinton’s “wars” were carefully chosen so as to not be ones that benefited the interests of the US. That was the attraction of the specific interventions to him and his fellow Dems. I suported the Bosnia intervention, but not the Kossovo or Haiti ones. The reason I supported Bosnia was to see the ethnic cleansing stopped. We protected Muslims when no other nation would do so (even support for the Bosnians by Muslim countries was inadequate) and we got as our thanks 9/11.

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